As networks continue to dramatically grow and scale up, boundaries of how to perform operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM), telemetry, and service level agreement (SLA) validation and reporting at scale are tested and stretched. In computer networking, OAM includes processes, functions, activities, tools, etc. that are designed to monitor and administer network operation in order to detect network faults, isolate said faults, and to measure the performance of the network. In-band OAM can be used as an ‘always on’ service that adds forwarding path or service path information in addition to other information and/or statistics to network traffic. In-band OAM is a term that can also include passive OAM and/or in network telemetry (INT). The information can be very detailed information about the state or the forwarding behavior that every packet in the network experiences. If in-band OAM is enabled for every packet in a network with all features, an enormous amount of data could potentially be created.
In-band OAM can create a record or datagram for each customer packet that in-band OAM is applied to. That is, in some cases where all traffic would be using in-band OAM, there can be an OAM data record created for every packet.